Stepping Beyond, In, and With JAEPL: Twenty Years of Hope

Kristie S. Fleckenstein

“The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from

a distance but live right in it, under its roof.” Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

I

speaks to the human need to live inside hope. Twenty years and twenty volumes of JAEPL attests to that need, for, rather than admire hope “from a distance,” the journal “live[d] right in it, under its roof” (306). Throughout its pages, via articles, style, and spirit, it embodied as well as articulated the dreams and aspirations of its parent organiza- tion. In this retrospective honoring the journal—helmed initially by Alice Glarden Brand (Volumes 1-3), then by Kristie S. Fleckenstein and Linda T. Calendrillo (Volumes 4-15),1 and currently by Joonna Smitherman Trapp and Brad Peters (Volumes 16-ongoing)—I mark three intertwined hopes and tropes that have circulated throughout JAEPL’s pages.2 First, we have longed to define and validate ourselves as a legitimate field of study by

stepping beyond the accepted parameters of literacy studies and, by so doing enrich, if not

transform, teacher-scholars, classrooms, and students. Second, we have at the same stepped

in, aspiring to connect not only to each other in the spirit of community but also to “the

inner landscape of the teaching self” (Palmer 4). And, third, we have stepped with the larger discipline within which we situate ourselves, returning to literacy studies writ large to nurture and celebrate the shifting center of reading-writing education. As the pages of

JAEPL reveals, we have lived inside these hopes for two decades, hopes that resonate to

disciplinary change and teacher-scholar’s dreams. ***

Posted at eye-level, the black and white sign warns us to close the door firmly, else inquisitive, possibly hungry, bears will wander the halls uninvited. So, as Linda and I step from the Alpen Inn into a mist-layered June morning, we double check the latch, ensuring that the yoga devotees in the second-floor common room will not rise from their surya namaska to salute unexpected wildlife rather than the more traditional sun. Lightly jacketed against the night’s lingering chill, Linda and I stretch, loosening tight quads, hamstrings, calves, and shoulders. Cupped within the calloused palms of the Rockies, the pre-dawn YMCA camp around us drowses in silence: no Frisbee games on the green, no engines growling, horns honking, or voices calling. Just silence. Pausing a moment as we face the east, almost as if to offer the breaking dawn our own sun salutation, an obeisance to the day’s hope. Finally, in wordless accord, we 1. Peter Elbow guest edited the final volume in Fleckenstein’s and Calendrillo’s tenure as co- editors: Volume 15, “Pictures of the Believing Game.”

2. Editors’ note: Readers are invited to browse the JAEPL archives and revisit the articles this essay reviews. Go to: http://trace.tennessee.edu/jaepl.

step beyond the safety of the lodge with its modern plumbing and comfortable beds, its balconies and electricity, to slip into a stillness lambent with possibilities.

***

In “Contemporary Composition Studies: Steps Beyond,” Brand chose as the theme for her inaugural issue of the fledging journal a hope central to the AEPL’s identity: a longing to define and validate a scholarly and pedagogical focus that extended beyond the accepted parameters of traditional composition, literary, and language arts educa- tion. Echoing the call to go “Beyond the Cognitive Domain”—the rallying cry of the 1991, 1992, and 1993 Conference on College Composition and Communication inter- est groups that served as the precursor for AEPL—the first issue spotlighted JAEPL’s desire to “step beyond” conventional approaches to composition studies as a means to enrich teachers, research, and students. In her editor’s message, Brand makes this aim explicit, declaring that this journal is “for thinking-feeling instructors who learn and teach, so to speak, to the beat of a different drummer” (v). That trope of launching off into terra incognita—of stepping beyond the security of the known dimensions of composition studies—became a common metaphor throughout the journal’s history as the titles many of its 15 themed volumes indicate. If the first issue stakes out “step- ping beyond,” the second issue reaffirms this hope, emphasizing the value of “Writing, Teaching, and Thinking in the Borderland,” claiming that “borderland” as JAEPL’s home territory, underscoring not just the ability to step beyond but also the necessity of stepping beyond. Subsequent issues, such as Volume 6’s “Between the Words: Reading and Writing the Unknown,” or Volume 7’s “At Risk: Teaching and Writing outside the Safety Zone,” as well as Volume 10’s “Leaping into Uncertainty: Teaching and Learning beyond Logic and Reason” likewise carry forth the hope of stepping beyond traditional boundaries to legitimate this new terrain. At the same time, the individual articles in these and other volumes manifested the hope of the “beyond” by mapping the specific contours of the landscape comprising JAEPL’s borderlands, as the journal’s attention to spirituality—one key landmark in this new landscape—illustrates.

“There are dreams, hopes, and yearning which possess our lives, calling us away from the usual round and the common tasks,” mystic and religious leader Howard Thurman reminds us, and establishing the academic and pedagogical salience of subject matter denigrated by the discipline of literacy studies constituted a crucial dream, hope, and yearning (45). JAEPL acted on that desire by calling readers away from “the usual round and the common tasks” and providing sustained attention to content rarely acknowl- edged in traditional academic venues, such as spirituality, or, as Parker Palmer defines, “the diverse ways we answer the heart’s longing to be connected with the largeness of life—a longing that animates love and work, especially the work called teaching” (5). Brand and Richard L. Graves note that in the early interest groups, “many didn’t know what or where the domain was. But . . . . they knew important things happened there,” and one of the important things happening consisted of inquiry into the oft-scorned phenomenon of spirituality (1). That inquiry initiated in the early 90s carried over into the pages of almost every volume of JAEPL for the next twenty years. Articles explored Western and Eastern spiritualities in their many guises, establishing “the heart’s longing

Fleckenstein / Stepping Beyond, In, and With JAEPL

to be connected with the largeness of life” as a focal issue—if not the focal issue—for K-12 and postsecondary education. JAEPL’s very first volume signals this hope, conclud- ing with Martha Goff Stone’s “Mastery: Or, Where Does True Wisdom Lie?” Here Goff introduces the value of Zen teaching practices, which, predicated on the art of “wait[ing] properly,” can balance Western teaching practices, characterized as a “mountain-climb- ing approach to wisdom” wherein all energies are fixated on moving toward a goal (89). Goff’s argument about the blending of Zen and Western practices acts on the assump- tion that such an argument is worth making; it begins the process of validating spiri- tuality in education as a laudable subject area, one worth exploring. Volume 2 (“Writ- ing, Teaching, and Thinking in the Borderland”) makes this claim ever more boldly; it builds on Goff’s beginning by paying particular attention to mapping the intricacies of spirituality in five of the volume’s ten essays. Signaling both the topic’s depth and range, the essays highlight the importance of spirituality in different configurations for prison classrooms (Trounstine), composition teaching (Papoulis), meditation (Kalamaras), Freirean liberation theology (Ferry), and students’ spiritual diversity (Buley-Meissner). Subsequent issues maintained a consistent attention on spirituality with individual arti- cles providing everything from the “alchemy” of an individual’s spiritual identity with his or her institutional identity (McCurrie 1) to an argument concerning writing-to- learn’s dependence on a “spiritual source of creativity” (Kearney 76). Through such an abiding emphasis on spirituality, JAEPL worked to establish the richness of this subject for educational endeavors and to validate its salience for teacher-scholars regardless of grade level, student demographic, or institutional type.

Spirituality illuminates the hope of stepping beyond, just as the provocative list of possible topics of interest—such as “intuition, inspiration, insight, imagery, meditation, silence, archetypes, emotion” and so forth—similarly underscores that hope. “For educational reform and cultural transformation,” James Moffett protests in The Universal

Schoolhouse, “nothing should be off the map,” and JAEPL serves this goal by taking

nothing off the educational map (17). Published in every volume as well as periodically revised and expanded throughout JAEPL’s history, the list of potential topics includes as well a reminder that any of this inventory is only suggestive, not inclusive. Promising subjects are never “limited to” a catalog, no matter how elaborate, but instead exist in any step beyond the borders of entrenched academic interests. In their innovative re-design of the JAEPL cover in Volume 16, co-editors Trapp and Peters state this aspiration visually and verbally. The “simple star” on the top right of the cover “at its core presents that scintilla of creativity that keeps teaching fresh and inventive” (vii). Here lies the hope for educational reformation and transformation that characterizes both JAEPL and its parent organization. Here, too, lies a second dream: stepping into, as well as beyond, our newly mapped territories.

***

“Your dreams, what you hope for and all that, it’s not separate from your life. It grows right up out of it.” Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams The morning-mist long burned off, the morning jog washed away, and the pre-dawn yoga practice still a road not taken, I drift back to the lodge from a 20-minute directed ramble

in the bright afternoon Colorado sun. Meeting Linda by chance at the lodge’s south door, we join other ramblers, who, like us, have returned for the second half of an afternoon workshop. One becomes two, then four and five, clustering together with our words tumbling over each other as our feet find their sure way to the second floor. With the sun streaming in from the west window, more than 35 kindred spirits in tennis shoes, flip-flops, and an occasional bare foot sit in a circle in a circular room, close enough to touch each other, skin heating skin, a flow of mutual energy and interest dissolving separations between institutional affiliations, geographical positions, ages, races, and genders. “So what did you bring back with you from your ramble?” the facilitator asks, leaving us to determine how we might interpret that “what” and how we might share it. Voices respond, at first tentative, and then with rising confidence until a lull brings us to a brimming silence. In that pause, Linda rises and steps into the circle. Saying nothing, she places at the center a smooth, oval rock, bringing into our common space a trace of the mountains beyond the windows and gesturing to its significance for her. As she sits, my heart flutters, bidding me to step more fully into the circle around and within me.

***

While stepping beyond is a foundational hope of JAEPL, one that circulates through- out its two decades of publication, it is not the only hope important to the “field” we call AEPL. Even as we stepped beyond—perhaps even because we stepped beyond—we also by necessity, stepped in, hoping through that movement to connect individually and collectively. In committing to non-traditional academic pursuits, to teaching and researching from unconventional perspectives or methodologies, we risk alienating our- selves from the larger discipline, becoming a stranger in a less that hospitable land. Such is the peril of stepping beyond. Palmer acknowledges the pain of communal betrayal, the “pain of people who thought they were joining a community of scholars but find themselves in distant, competitive, and uncaring relationships with colleagues and stu- dents” (21). He likens this pain to dismemberment, the result of “being disconnected from our own truth, from the passions that took us into teaching, from the heart that is the source of all good work” (21). To create a home, a safe zone, for the many who felt homeless within or dismembered by the larger discipline, JAEPL fostered stepping in, vigorously pursuing a kind of intellectual and emotional outreach. Brand in her edi- tor’s message for the first issue, articulates the spirit of welcome intrinsic to stepping in: “Feel free,” she urges, “to recommend individuals whose interests intersect with ours but who may not be affiliated with the Assembly” (viii). Evoking the spirit of James Moffett, one of AEPL’s charter members, Brand’s invitation resonates with the belief that “to be spiritual is to perceive our oneness with everybody and everything and to act on this perception” (Moffett xix). The articles in JAEPL reveal this hope for such oneness, first, through articles that dismantle pernicious binaries and, second, through articles to draw us to cherish the inner life: our own and our students’.

Regina Paxton Foehr and Susan A. Schiller in their introduction to The Spiritual

Side of Writing emphasize the need for community, advocating fellowship through shar-

ing ideas. Through such intercourse, they assert, we “can create connectedness to each other and represent a search toward truth” (ix). Palmer reinforces the need to share, for, he warns, without it, we forget who we are, “with unhappy consequences for our poli- tics, our work, our hearts” (20). Sharing ideas reminds us, re-members us, connects us.

Fleckenstein / Stepping Beyond, In, and With JAEPL

But for JAEPL, the key is not just sharing any ideas; it is sharing ideas that forge bonds that foster an ecumenical vision of teaching and learning. This hope manifests itself in

JAEPL through contributions that aim to heal divisions—for example, those caused by

binary thinking.

Rather than East vs. West, emotion vs. intellect, belief vs. critique, conscious vs. unconscious, image vs. word, or spiritual vs. secular, the pages of JAEPL hearken to Howard Thurman’s gentle reminder that “there must be a unity deeper than the area of conflict” (103). Palmer concurs, advocating a deeper unity: “to chart that [teaching] landscape fully, three important paths must be taken—intellectual, emotional, and spiritual—and none can be ignored. Reduce teaching to intellect, and it becomes a cold abstraction; reduce it to emotions, and it becomes narcissistic; reduce it to the spiritual, and it loses its anchor to the world (4).” The hopeful agenda of a “deeper unity” begins in JAEPL’s very first issue with Derek Owens, who, in “Earthworm Hermeneutics,” exposes “what’s wrong with binary thinking that wants either to preserve final bound- aries or transgress (through exclusion) ‘all’ of them” (9). Relying on a “worm motif,” Owens argues for an approach that neither reifies nor eliminate binaries. Rather, he advocates respecting boundaries by tunneling beneath them to assist the “rise and fall of boundaries” but “without seeking to contain or restrict the variation on the surface” (11). Constructing boundaries is human, he says, so our charge is to “imagine newer, richer ways of articulating whatever boundaries we seek to build with and over the old” (9).

That agenda is forwarded in different ways throughout JAEPL but is especially evident in the articles that burrow beneath the mind-body binary to transform those boundaries without sacrificing variety. Thus, Volume 1’s Tim Doherty in “Strictly Ball- room” draws on Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, especially bodily- kinesthetic knowing, to emphasize “moving words” (18). He argues for a pedagogy that shifts “student awareness of thoughts and feelings into and out of somatic and linguis- tic action” (19). Fifteen years later in Volume 16, Sara K. Schneider similarly builds on Gardner’s bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, advocating in the K-12 classroom “play- ful choices” and detailing different types of learning that can guide those pedagogical choices. Doherty’s and Schneider’s efforts to reconfigure the mind-body binary is com- plemented by articles that further this agenda, this hope, by introducing yoga, the quint- essential practice melding mind, body, and spirit. Contributors like Geraldine DeLuca in “Headstands, Writing, and the Rhetoric of Radical Self-Acceptance” find in yoga the inspiration and the tools to wed curriculum with students’ bodies and minds, not by practicing it necessarily in the class but by mining its experience and precepts for peda- gogical guidance. Christy I. Wenger in “Writing Yogis” goes even further in reshaping the mind-body binary by introducing yoga in the writing classroom, especially through

pranayama, or focused meditative breathing. Such techniques help students embody

their writing (24-25). Judith Beth Cohen in Volume 12 likewise recovers the “missing body” in higher education, highlighting how her practice of yoga changed her teaching. Seeking, like Wenger, to redress the separation of mind and body, she brings strategies derived from her practice into the classroom to change how her students learn. From Owens to Doherty, from “earthworm hermeneutics” to “moving words,” JAEPL has fos- tered sharing ideas to help us re-member, a process that feeds into the second form of stepping in: attending to one’s inner life.

Hope grows out of the life lived, Kingsolver muses in Animal Dreams (136), which includes the life lived beneath the skin, “the place where intellect and emotion and spirit and will converge in the human self” (Palmer 11). If connecting as a community is an abiding hope of JAEPL, then connecting to and with oneself is an equally abiding hope. Moffett explains that we as a group might have a “common goal or desideratum, but,” he continues, “each person starts toward it from unique circumstances and conditions in which he or she is enmeshed, like the spirit fallen into and involved in matter so idio- syncratically that only certain paths or means will work” (9). Education, he notes, con- sists of “finding for oneself what these are,” a process that relies on plumbing one’s inner life (“Soul School” 9). Palmer agrees, contending that one’s inner life is the “landscape of the teaching self” from which the good teacher emerges (4). JAEPL exemplifies the hope self-connecting—of stepping into the circle of self—by inviting teachers to explore in a variety of ways the life inside. Making that invitation explicit in Volume 14, Gina Briefs-Elgin takes as her starting point a particularly low point in a teacher’s inner life: burn out, or the “dull ache” that makes us feel as if we are just trying to “get through